Posted on 04/13/2022 5:08:24 PM PDT by dennisw
But as the crowd pushes inside, a wiry man with elfin features is sprinting out of the venue, past astonished selfie takers and venture capitalists. Some call out, imploring him to stay; others even chase him down the street, on foot and on scooters. Yet the man outruns them all, disappearing into the privacy of his hotel lobby, alone.
Vitalik Buterin, the most influential person in crypto, didn’t come to Denver to party. He doesn’t drink or particularly enjoy crowds. Not that there isn’t plenty for the 28-year-old creator of Ethereum to celebrate. Nine years ago, Buterin dreamed up Ethereum as a way to leverage the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin for all sorts of uses beyond currency. Since then, it has emerged as the bedrock layer of what advocates say will be a new, open-source, decentralized internet. Ether, the platform’s native currency, has become the second biggest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, powering a trillion-dollar ecosystem that rivals Visa in terms of the money it moves. Ethereum has brought thousands of unbanked people around the world into financial systems, allowed capital to flow unencumbered across borders, and provided the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products, from payment systems to prediction markets, digital swap meets to medical-research hubs.
But even as crypto has soared in value and volume, Buterin has watched the world he created evolve with a mixture of pride and dread. Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, and mind-boggling scams. “Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong,” the Russian-born Canadian explains the morning after the party in an 80-minute interview in his hotel room.
(Excerpt) Read more at archive.ph ...
Buterin worries about the dangers to overeager investors, the soaring transaction fees, and the shameless displays of wealth that have come to dominate public perception of crypto. “The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling,” he says, referring to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, an überpopular NFT collection of garish primate cartoons that has become a digital-age status symbol for millionaires including Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton, and which have traded for more than $1 million a pop.
“There definitely are lots of people that are just buying yachts and Lambos.”
NOTE to mods. The title up top is the title I have on the dead trees edition Time Magazine.
NFT values have plummeted in the 3+ weeks since this interview.
I’m sort of glad that I don’t understand a word of this.
I have no doubt a lot of people have made real money with crypto. By any definition, however, any crypto is the “fiat-est” of fiat currencies.
No thanks
What a pile of complete BS from the usual Soros-worshipping weenies at Time.
The one thing that the liars at Time forgot to include was that Trump got elected by Russians.
This is the kind of crap that needs to be banned from FR because the propaganda is revolting and obvious.
They aren’t geniuses. They were lucky to get in on the ground floor.
There are two meanings of the word “fiat” that are both implied when people refer to fiat currencies.
The first meaning is “faith”, as in, not redeemable for a standard unit of a commodity at a bank. I agree that crypto meets this definition.
The second is “at the stroke of a pen”, i.e. that more currency may be produced at will and without limit. Crypto does not meet this definition.
The US dollar satisfies both definitions, though.
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